VuPoint Solution's Magic Wand Is Not As Accurate As Harry Potter's

Move over Harry Potter, VuPoint Solution's Magic Wand is ready for battle, er, scanning. With the clever and lightweight (7.5 oz) Magic Wand, you can scan documents, receipts, and photos from anywhere.

The process is simple: press the power button to begin the scanning process, then run the wand over an image or sheet of paper to capture its contents. One LED indicator tells you when it's scanning, another alerts you if you've made an error or it's time to juice up. The Wand stores the images on a microSD card, which you can also transfer to your laptop via USB. The screen next to the power button shows how many documents you've scanned into the device's memory.

Oddly, the Wand uses AA batteries for power, instead of USB, which would have made the device lighter and more portable. At least the batteries were included.

Waving the wand over black text at a smooth pace went well, but but varying the tempo too much caused things to go haywire--certain lines were stretched vertically. We tested the scanner on average black and white documents, receipts and images, and found the JPEGs it produced to be accurate (when we got the tempo right).

The bundled software was our least favorite part of the package. Included in the box is the Abbyy Screenshot Reader for converting images of text to editable text via OCR. There was no way to export to, say, PDF or make business cards into csv files. But you can export text to the clipboard, Microsoft Word, Excel, or e-mail. However, once copied, errors in the translation from image to text became apparent, often transferring the majority of the copy into gibberish.

VuPoint's offering is a decent scanner, and we like that you can throw in your bag and hit the road easily. However, as the OCR isn't the best, users may find that the JPEG is more useful than the resulting plain text, which isn't useful at all. For $99 the Magic Wand isn't very expensive, though you'll end up paying more for good OCR software to make it useful. If you already have some and just need to upgrade your scanner, this is a decent choice.